Syracuse, N.Y. -- Chip Crawford of Baldwinsville estimates that for every military veteran like himself who has been treated for post-traumatic stress disorder, there are five others who need the same help but are not getting it.

“They’re just living with the pain, trying to go about living in the world, even though you don’t fit in,” said Crawford, 50, who served with the U.S. Coast Guard in the early 1980s in Grenada and Lebanon.

Crawford shared his story at the Syracuse VA Medical Center earlier this week at Recovery Day, a program designed to encourage veterans who need help with PTSD and other mental health issues to come to the VA. Other veterans, family members and VA officials joined Crawford.

“The nightmares never end but the treatment you get helps you deal with them,” Crawford said.

The Syracuse VA provides mental health services to more than 7,000 patients annually and expects those numbers to grow as more soldiers return from combat in Iraq and Afghanistan.

PTSD is an anxiety disorder people can develop after experiencing traumatic events involving injury and death. The VA estimates as many as 20 percent of the U.S. soldiers who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan are battling PTSD.

“It’s the one mental health issue that tends to unite veterans the most,” said Robert Barash, a Syracuse VA psychologist. Untreated PTSD often leads to depression and many other problems, he said.

Barash said returning veterans often avoid seeking mental health care. That’s because they are taught in the military to accomplish their missions, even if they are hurt, he said.
“We’re dealing with the military code of courage,” he said.

The VA wants veterans to know there’s nothing cowardly about seeking help for PTSD or any other mental health issue, Barash said.

Crawford said he isolated himself when he returned to civilian life and took a job cutting down trees in Oswego County. After getting injured on the job in 2008, Crawford went to a state agency for vocational rehabilitation. During that process, testing showed he had PTSD. Since then he’s received inpatient and outpatient treatment for PTSD.
“I have reinvented myself,” he said.

Lynn Chapman of LaFayette has two sons who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. She prodded her youngest son, Jeremy, to get help at the Syracuse VA when he came home from Iraq. He was part of an Army tank division that saw significant combat in 2004 and 2005. He came home with PTSD.

“He went into the Army when he was 17 and when he got out he was expected to navigate the world as an adult when he never had an opportunity to develop any adult skills,” said Chapman, who works as a mental health counselor. “It was overwhelming for him.”

Her son, now, 26, lives in Texas and is recovering.

“I feel the services he got at the Syracuse VA really saved his life and helped save our family,” she said.

Deborah Gosbee of Syracuse became an Army medic when she was 18 toward the end of the Vietnam War. She took care of hospitalized soldiers at Fort Sam Houston in Texas who were recovering from phosphorous burns

“There are still nights when I can smell burning flesh,” Gosbee said. “I was exposed to things I was not mature enough to handle.”

When she came home Gosbee said she bounced from job to job and became increasingly angry and depressed. In 1999 she was hospitalized at the Syracuse VA and diagnosed with bipolar disorder. She said the services at the VA helped her get her life back on track. She has not been hospitalized since 2003.

She said veterans who need mental health services should not wait as long as she did.
“Don’t waste 20 or 30 years of your life,” she said. “If there’s one person out there who’s not getting help, that’s too many.”

Barash, the VA psychologist, said early treatment is important because unaddressed mental health issues like PTSD can lead to broken marriages, jail sentences, alcoholism, drug abuse and suicide.

“The difference between getting services or not can be the difference between life and death,” he said.